Episode 149 - The Future Is Now

Welcome to Sick Comgeeks, I'm Dave Cohen. And I'm James Carey. And today's episode is a bit of a first for us because this is the first time we've had a guest with no immediate obvious links to comedy. She is, however, a guru of self-publishing, undisputed queen of doing-yourself creativity, and we're delighted to welcome Joanna Penn.

Hi, Joanna. Oh, hi guys, thanks for having me on the show. Well, it's great to have you. We've actually picked a perfect time to have you because Joanna, as well as being the great self-publishing guru, is a podcast, you've been doing this for many years.

And in fact, you've just listened to episode 500 of your podcast. Whoa, yeah, bravo. That's for 500. Oh, thank you.

Well, it's so funny because you start doing these things. I imagine you guys with comedy, it's very similar. You start doing something because you feel like you want to express yourself or you want to achieve something. And then 12 years later, you look up and you go, wow, OK.

I've achieved quite a lot. And all it is, it's funny, a lot of people have asked me lately. Even with the writing and the books and everything, is how do you get to this point? And it's like, well, it's been over a decade.

And I've just consistently produced for the years. And I think it's probably the same in a comedy career. It's the same with whatever you want to achieve. It literally is just step by step, day by day, when I say that you are the guru of self-publishing.

How many books have you now published in that 12 year period? I've got over 30 books now. I write nonfiction as Joanna Penn. That's 30, 30 books.

Yeah, and I write fiction as JF Penn. So, Jo Francis Penn. And basically, I write thrillers and dark fantasy. I've got that kind of dark inside of me in my fiction.

And then I write self-help for authors as Joanna Penn. And it's always good to have a couple of brands, I think, because you can do different things. OK. So you're like, it's not the UNM banks.

The UNBanks, one is science fiction, and the other one isn't. Isn't that right? Yeah. So let's go back to episode one of the Joanna Penn podcast, the person that you were at that point.

So how did you get to the situation you're in now? Well, in terms of the writing, so at that point, I was living in Australia. So sort of 2006 to 2008, I was miserable in my day job. I used to implement accounts payable into large corporates, which is not the most creative life.

And I didn't have a creative outlet. So I decided I was going to write a self-help book on career change. That was my first book. And when I wrote that, and then I looked at the publishing industry, and remember, this was before the Kindle, this was before the iPhone, actually, sort of 2006.

And I looked at the publishing industry, and I saw how long it was going to take me to get my book into the world. And I've always been a bit of a self-starter, always had a bit of a rebellious independent streak. And then I started getting into the speaker scene. And a lot of speakers obviously use a lot of comedy.

But I saw that the speakers were doing this self-publishing thing, and they were printing their books, and they were selling them at the back of the room when they were doing their live events. And I thought, well, I could do that. I could put my book out. I could get speaking gigs.

And I'll sell my book that way. And so that's what I ended up doing. I published that first book. Newspapers and this.

And then I realized that you can't sell many books that way. That actually what I needed to do. This was then the Kindle came out, the iBooks and all these different online platforms. And I discovered that you could sell books to the whole world.

And this was very exciting for me. So that sort of began how I could distribute my work. And then podcasting was very much, well, how do you reach the world? Obviously, the internet and podcasting seemed a really good way to try and reach the rest of the world.

And also I got to talk to people along the way. And I imagine that's why you guys do it too. But basically, everything came together in terms of the technology to allow me to publish and also market on the internet. And that's how I started selling mainly in America back in the day.

And now I've sold books in 143 countries. And my podcast goes out to over 220 countries have downloaded my show. So it's really a case of discovering that the whole world is your market. It's not just the people in your town.

Yeah. And I've just been listening to your episode 500. And quite honestly, it could easily have been an episode that we've made. Your main topics, the first thing that you were saying was right what you love.

The second thing you said, your first draft always sucks. And, James, and I have discussed this many times. And I suppose this is the first way in which the link between us and what you're doing is I think we could have a bit of a discussion about how that kind of fear of putting your stuff out there and how you overcome that to create this phenomenal number of books, novels and nonfiction. Yeah, so I think fear is never going to go away.

I think that's the one thing you realize. I mean, I can't imagine trying stand up comedy. Like that terrifies. I have thought about doing some improv courses and things like that.

But I imagine that there's the same fear with speaking your mind as writing your mind. And I've certainly had a lot more issues with writing fiction and worrying about putting that in the world. Fear of judgment. I think fear that someone will read my book and think, oh, she's very dark or very strange or why is she killing everyone?

And the things that you write in your books, if you read my fiction, you really see into my brain. You see a part of me that even my family sometimes don't see because they read my books. As we all know, our family is not usually our biggest fans. No, no.

But in terms of facing that fear, I think when you find your creative outlet that you really love and you discover that you can do this, you enjoy doing it. And once I wrote that first book and then I wrote my first novel, 2009 to 2011. And that, you know, to really see the first few years were quite slow. And then it was a bit like a snowball speeding up.

I left my job in 2011 to go full time as a writer and also podcast that online and all of that. And since then, I love doing this. I love what I do. And that has to be why we keep doing it.

And if you're not scared a little bit, then maybe you're not putting yourself out there enough. And maybe you're not going deep enough if you're not a little bit scared or a lot scared. Because in that way, you know that what you're doing really does come from the heart. Now, to be very clear, I'm a business woman.

I make multi-six figures doing running my business. I absolutely write books to also sell them. But I write them from an authentic place. But then I market them and make money from them.

So I really believe you can do both. But I agree. I mean, the fear is still there. It never goes away.

You just have to learn to live with it and keep creating. I was talking about that moment when there was presumably a point where you had to stop doing what you were doing in order to do what you're currently doing full time. And it might not have been obvious that that was the right decision. Was there a bit where you had to slightly take a bit of a leap and go, if I'm going to make a go of this, then I'm really going to have to stop doing, earning easy money, doing my previous job as it was, in a job that I know how to do, in order to start doing a job I'm going to have to kind of figure out as I go along.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, to be clear, so I started writing 2006. I left my job 2011. So I spent five years doing this, getting up at 5 a.m.

writing, coming home from work, working on my website, connecting, podcasting, working every weekend. I mean, I made a big decision, which was, I basically opted out of my career. I said, I will do my, I didn't say this, obviously to them, but I said, I will do this work. I will get paid and I will do nothing else.

So when people ask me to do extra stuff at work, I'm not doing it. And I'm just doing what I need to do to keep my job. And also my husband, incredible, supportive husband, I said to him, I can't do this anymore. Like I got to the point where I was crying at work.

I was so miserable. They were paying me like six figures and I was just miserable. And I said to my husband, I can't do this. And so we downsized.

This is a really big deal. We sold everything. We sold our investment properties. We sold our house.

We moved into rented accommodation, cleared all our debt. And so that because I was earning more money at the time than he was in order that we could take a step back and that I could really focus on growing the business. And then when I actually left the job, I had six months income, saved. And when I left, I said to my husband, if in six months, I'm not making this amount of money.

I will go back to work. Now it turned out that in six months, I was not making that amount of money, but I was on the way. And we basically said, all right, let's give this a go. But it took, so 2011, I left my job.

And 2015 was when I actually surpassed what I had earned in my previous career. And now I earn multiple times what I used to earn. So I completely understand. I would say to people, do not just go, right, I'm going to become a stand-up comedian, just leave my job and do that.

As I said, it was five years of working. Nowadays, they kind of call it a side hustle. Back then, the language was a little bit different. It was basically a side hustle.

I was very, very committed. But the moment of decision, the decision is I am going to do this whatever it takes. And that's kind of the way it still is for me is I love writing books. And I'm going to figure out how to do this, whatever it takes.

Because so much has changed since I started self-publishing. And even things, the way we do stuff, the way we market, the way we sell books, it has radically changed, really. But I just pivoted and kept up with the latest thing, and multiple streams of income, and just kept going, really. And because I love it.

And that has to be what it comes down to. Well, I think that's an interesting point to come in and talk about the comedy world. Because I would say that we are possibly at the point in comedy, where you looked at the world of publishing in 2006 or whatever. When James and I started this podcast in 2015, it was very much about write your sitcom script to get it made for TV or radio.

And that still is our kind of principle thing. But in the last two or three years, we've come around more and more. We've seen more and more people making things online, more and more independent companies. And just starting to see, and obviously, Covid has kind of increased the amount of online interaction and comedy.

So we're starting to see possibly a world in which it might be possible, more possible for people who want to write comedy to do it through, not through the traditional roots. And I was wondering if you're looking at the kind of trends that you know, and you've seen with publishing, do you think that's likely to be a possible thing to happen with TV and movies? Well, TV and movies, the main thing, the main difference with being an independent creator when it comes to books is that you can do this yourself. Now, I call myself an independent author.

I run an independent publishing house because I do work with professional editors, professional cover designers, you know, other professional graphic people, like professional marketing people. So I have a team of freelancers, but mainly I can do this myself. I don't need anyone else. And it doesn't cost that much to the overhead for being a fiction writer, for example, or very, very small.

To get a film made or to get a TV series made, you can do it yourself, but you need a lot of different skills. So the main difference, I think, is the amount of collaboration that is needed to produce, you know, video and even something like a multicast audio production. But what I would say is obviously you've got plenty of, I mean, TikTok is the big one right now, right? There are people, comedians, that woman who does the Donald Trump, you know, uses his words and does them on TikTok.

I can't remember my name, but I'm just laughing away at this stuff. And my husband watches a lot of YouTube and a lot of comedy on YouTube. There's plenty of people who have their own shows on YouTube. And I think the biggest mindset shift, also audio books, I was going to mention, you didn't ask about audio books, audio books are huge right now.

And I listen to Sue Perkins, has a couple of books out, and she obviously she's hilarious and I'm just laughing away. And so there's a lot of ways that you can do comedy that is not just, I know this is sitcom for geeks. But, you know, we're open to, you know, any form of comedy writing, you know, is all fair game really. And it's, for some people, it can be an end in itself to, you know, to do situation comedy.

But for others, it's just, I love writing comedy. How can I do it? And how can I do it professionally? You know, that's, you know, I think, and as I said, there is a mindset shift, which is about where your money comes from.

Because if you, let's say you write a sitcom, you're a writer at the BBC for, you know, sitcom or whatever, TV network, you get paid from this third party and they pay you. And that's what you're used to doing. So it's a bit like a job in that, you know, I used to work for a company, I get paid once a month, I get, you know, this money would come in in in a big chunk. My model of business, I literally have hundreds now, multi hundreds, like maybe about 400 or last count of different income streams.

And those income streams vary. So that's one income stream might be 10 bucks a month from, you know, one, from a short story. It might be, you know, two and a half grand from doing, selling Korean rights to one of my books. It might be, you know, 50 bucks from a course that I made that I sell.

So each of these streams of income in total gives me far more than I used to get with this one paycheck, but the mindset shift to go from, you know, one chunk of money every month from the same company to multiple streams of income from people all over the place. So you guys have a Patreon, right? For the show. Yeah.

So, Patreon is brilliant. I have a Patreon and I love my Patrons and they are amazing people who put in a small, yes, wonderful. Wow, one or two. They put in a small amount of money every month.

And in total, that can add up to really good money. And there are, you know, musicians, Amanda Palmer is probably the most famous, who makes, who now just does everything for her Patrons. And that's how she makes like 50 round a month, basically. So this is the thing.

It's about shifting your mindset to multiple streams of income. So, you know, a comedian, it might be, OK, I'm going to write my, I know you guys have got some nonfiction books on how to write comedy. Then you've got, you know, maybe you do a workshop or something once we can or do an online thing. They may also do some stand up on me, get paid for that.

Maybe, you know, there's lots of different things you can do to earn money in different ways. And then something like a YouTube channel is interesting now because it used to be that people rely very much on ads. But now you see Patreon and other forms of merchandising or other forms of sponsorship, whether a YouTuber or whatever platform they're on and now getting money in other ways. So I think that mindset shift is the key.

I think that was a massive revelation to me yesterday, listening to your episode, where you were talking about rights and, you know, that it's actually, it's not as difficult as we think it is. And I've, I've have literally for the last nearly 40 years always were, when I had work and I've been kind of having an agent and, but I've always had the mindset of, I am an artist, you know, I don't, I can't handle this money stuff. It's just too complicated. It's much easier to hand it all over to my agent and listening to you talking yesterday about, well, if you want to have your rights for this and that, and I've been thinking about the various books and things, I don't think it, yeah, I could do that.

And, but first I'm not getting a huge knot in my stomach and thinking, oh my God, this is something my agent would do. But actually I could just learn it myself. And, and I think this is a fantastic thing for, because a lot of people I know in comedy feel the same way. It's like, you know, I, like me, I think they're very kind of scared, they're scared of money.

And it's always, I'll, I'll leave all that to my agent. And I do think that for the future, people who want to get on in comedy, there's, for professionals as the fear of like, Oh, you know, I've got to get the agent to do it. When people who are starting out, it's more a kind of, well, actually, I could just get these, if I could get a thousand people who like my YouTube channel or my podcast or my, my radio version of podcasts, then I could actually develop my own career. So I don't know, James, if you think that's a possible.

Yeah, no, I was going to come in on that in that. I think comedy particularly does attract people who don't really do systems, particularly well. And when, as you're talking about all of the different fingers and pies that you've got, some of them will actually would start to freak out at that. And in a way, it's just a question of taking ownership of what excites you and what you can do and try to get other people to do stuff that you're worried about.

So occasionally I have a conversation with my accountant, because I can't do my account. And the faintest idea. And, you know, when it comes to, I was looking at some online thing and I just wrote an email to my accountant and just said, how would the tax situation work on this? I don't know what an E9 form is that the American website would have to make me feel it in order to, is that more trouble than it's worth?

Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. It's just a question of knowing what you're good at and doing that and being prepared to learn new things. I remember hearing, I think Werner Herzog or somebody said, you can make a movie for $4,000. All you need to do is teach yourself how to make a movie for $4,000.

You're going to have to edit it yourself. Well, that's OK. Learn how to edit. You're going to have to do this.

You're going to have to do that. OK, well, and if you don't want to do that, you're going to have to work out how to raise a bit of money to pay someone else to do the things that you don't want to do. And that's fine. But I think writers particularly, and we had this chat on a little Patreon chat the other day, writers can see having an agent as a bit of a magic wand and that they will sort everything out for you.

And actually, although I'm very grateful to my agent and she's brilliant and I wouldn't want to stop being represented by her, they don't generate you that much work. They're very good at reading contracts and making sure that you're getting an increase in your fee. But that's in TV and radio. That's a very specific market.

And there's a whole load of other things that I do which generate income that my agent has no interest in negotiating or dealing with. So it's a question of figuring out what you're comfortable with and not seeing an agent as the answer to everything. Because I guess in the authors world, particularly, there is a way of saying, well, if only I could get an agent and get a mainstream publisher, all my problems would be over. And you go, wow, no, the money in mainstream publishing is terrible.

Isn't this? Well, it depends what kind of deal you get. I mean, obviously some people, and I'm sure it's the same in comedy and TV, there are a certain group of writers who still do make very good money. But it's a bit more like the lottery in a way and absolutely if you want to play the lottery, then great.

And I have deals with publishers all over the place. I license different rights. And an independent author and an independent creative, the main difference is taking responsibility for your career and saying nobody cares about your career like you do. And most authors certainly, well, many authors, let's say there is a rare author who will stick with one agent and one publisher for their entire career.

Very rare. Most authors will make change agents, will change publishers or a publisher will go bust, you know, or get bored or things change. I mean, the BBC, as you mentioned before, is a great case in point. There was a few years back where they just let a whole load of people go, right?

In the audio book space, I think that was a big one. You know, a lot of people who relied on that got let go as funding changes. And what we have to take responsibility for our own creative lives and also our own business lives. So and it's got to come from a place of what you're happy doing.

And what you said, what you enjoy and what you can learn. I do want to come back on that tax form though, because it made me laugh because there is a specific tax form. I think it's the W8 Ben BN or BNE. And what's so funny is that is a form.

If you don't feel that kind of form in when you do something like self-publish on Amazon, you have 40% withholding tax will be taken off your money. And I actually remember feeling the same way back in 2010 when I first self-published on Amazon. I was like, but I'm only making $2 a month. So why would I?

I'm not going to bother filling this film in a form in because I'm just not making enough money. And now it's an extreme amount of money. So what I would say is you can learn all these things. And the great thing about the internet, as you guys know about podcasting, about blogs, I mean, I have a free e-book successful self-publishing, which, you know, there's no excuse.

It's free. You can get it. You can follow it and it will tell you how to do all this stuff. And there are lots of people sharing their journeys and how to do everything.

I mean, you mentioned the filmmaking there or even with comedy, masterclass.com, you can pay 99 US dollars and you can learn a ton of stuff. Like they have everything on there. I've done the Dan Brown's course. I've done James Paterson's course.

There are all kinds of brilliant places to learn their stuff now. So I would just say to people, like, be more empowered, empower yourself with the knowledge to do these things. And that literally is very little you can't do now if you want to. You just have to make a decision and then learn how to do it, as you say.

But then equally, it is deciding what you're not going to do. And for example, I started screenwriting a couple of years ago and then I discovered that it is a very different world to books. And I decided for now I'm not going to screen write. But what I'm probably going to do is turn those screenplays into audio dramas because audio dramas are something that are within the realm of possibility.

They're a lot cheaper to produce and the audio space is just awesome right now. So that's an example. Why don't we talk about your creative process? Because obviously you do a lot of time.

You spend a lot of time talking about how to promote yourself as independent author and lots of other things like that. But in terms of actually plotting your novels and how do you go about, you know, are you kind of making it up as you go along and changing your system? Or do you have a fairly rigorous system in terms of how you actually write? Well, I think certainly, obviously, when we all start out, we kind of fuddle around and make it up.

I think probably by book five, you start to figure out a way of writing and you figure out what's kind of meant to happen when you write a book. But I still pretty much have the same process now, which is, are you scrivener software? Yes, so I often base my books and my ideas around places that I travel. So at the moment, I'm writing Tree of Life, which is based on the Portuguese empire or what was the Portuguese empire?

Because I went to Lisbon and then if you've been to Lisbon, there's a big mosaic and it has what the Portuguese empire used to be. And I was like, wow, this is awesome. So I started researching and figuring out how I could put in lots of things. And then I went to Amsterdam and went to the Portuguese synagogue and didn't really know that a group of Portuguese Jews had ended up in Amsterdam.

And so I sort of followed that also, Jamaica. So there are some just incredibly interesting things when you start looking at history. And then what I generally do with my thrillers is I weave that into modern day conspiracy thriller, really. That's what I do, sort of down-brown style thrillers.

That's one of my things. I have some other books as well. But so my writing process is really just, I love research. I'm just obsessed with research.

I do a lot of that. And then I will start the book. I generally know my opening scene. I know how it's going to end and I have a couple of things in the middle that I'm like, yeah, this has to happen.

This has to happen. And then I just assign time. And this, we all know, this is the key. So I have a particular, when I do my first draft, that's what I focus on.

I do sort of two to four hours a day writing. And I just, I normally get the first draft done in about five to six weeks. And then I work on, yeah, I mean, I'm full-time writer. I don't really have much of an excuse.

And then I then go through the editing process and I have professional editor I work with who's been with me for a few books now and she's just great. And then I do some revisions and go through some pre-reading and all the rest of it. But basically, I just, I get my ideas from where we travel. And like my, I've just finished a trilogy of fantasy novels based here in Bath.

Split World Fantasy where if you know the circus, which is this round sort of Georgian place with a group of plane trees in the middle and I just walked through it one night and thought, what if there was a portal to another world in the middle of Bath? And that kind of, and what if I could walk through maps as a lot of map shots in Bath? So I started writing that that's based here. I've got a London series as well, my broken Daniel psychological thriller.

So I'm just very inspired by the places I go. And I mean, I think comedy is probably the same way. You're inspired by the things you see or the things you experience. And then I, my main character in my arcane series, Morgan Sierra, it's got a lot of me in her.

So, you know, that makes sense. A lot of them, James and I have done, we read a lot of scripts and a lot of what we've kind of felt in the last year or so is where scripts are let down is in the plotting. And I know that plotting is something that is very important to you. And I wonder how thorough and how you get about getting your plotting right ahead of actually sitting down and writing the first draft.

Well, there are two main schools of writers, you know, the plotters and the so-called panzers. I prefer the term discovery writer. And actually I'm more of a discovery writer. But what I do, I do.

Can you sort of explain roughly what you mean by a plotter? Yeah, so a plotter would be someone like Jeffrey Deaver is a classic example of a plotter. He will write sort of a 200 page outline, which is everything that is going to happen in the book. And then he will write the book that follows the outline exactly.

Whereas someone like Stephen King is a panzer or a discovery writer and he does not plot and he just starts writing and then at some point finishes writing and something happens. Now it's interesting because Stephen King is one of my favorite writers and I absolutely, some of his books are my favorite books, like the Stand is one of my favorite books. It is a fantastic book. But equally, some of his books have endings that can be disappointing, which may be because of the lack of plotting, but you know, he's just a modern master.

But what I do find is that when, obviously you can revise things, but for me, I write thrillers, like that's my main series. I know what happens in a thriller. We all know what happens in a thriller. Like there are some things that have to happen in the obligatory scenes, things like, you know, at some point the hero has to confront the villain.

There has to be some kind of, like a physical fight or some kind of fight and the hero will look like they're losing and then they'll come back and then they'll win and they save the world. You know, there are genre tropes and then what we have to do as writers is have original things within the genre trope. So for example, one of my favorite films is Con Air, which I love Con Air. I just love it.

I mean, you know what's going to happen. You absolutely know that the good guy is going to win in the end. He's going to get back to his family and all that. The fun is the stuff that happens along the way.

So to me, the kind of what can I blow up is stuff that goes on in the plot, right? But we still have to remember that characters are very important and that we have to have strength in those characters. So it's so interesting that you say that plot let's squips down because, you know, I definitely do not have a problem with plot. And in fact, when I pitched to an agent once and one of my screenplays and he said, this is great, but it'll cost you $200 million.

How about you write something like a small budget horror movie? And I was like, well, I just, yeah, exactly. I'm like, yeah, I just say right like that. I write big, big stuff.

That's what I naturally, those are the movies I like. You know, I love a vengeance. The three most expensive words you can write, I think, are the fleets engage. You know, okay, that's why the colour drains from the production managers face at that point.

Yeah. So I think what this is why I'm talking about audio drama. Audio drama is, I think, very exciting thing. And of course, audio comedies or whatever else because there's no, well, the production value is so much lower because you can have the fleet engaging.

You can have sounds of the fleet engaging and you don't, and people can imagine that. So I really, I'm very excited about this Renaissance in audio. I think that we can do this. We can do this easily.

You can hire actors. You can also within a couple of years, it will be, you'll be able to do use AI voices as well. So there will be ways that we can produce audio at a much more cost-effective rate. And you know, readers and listeners will love it.

Well, I know from listening to your podcasts as well, and this is partly speculation on your part. But you talk a lot about Spotify and how Spotify is going to try and do with audio, what it has succeeded in doing with music. And the possibility that more and more things will be done on Spotify. Do you think there is a possibility that that audio, comedy and drama, which has only ever been really done on radio for, and more or less in the whole world?

Do you think that there's a prospect for that on thanks to Spotify? Yeah, and I find it funny that you say that because of course, that's very English, very UK focused. But I think on a kind of global scale and there, I mean, podcast drama, I started listening to podcast dramas over a decade ago, certainly not by the BBC. And so, you know, multi-cast dramas and other things that people put out on podcast feeds back in the day.

So I don't think this is anything new and podcast fiction is huge. It's a huge niche already. And what's interesting and Spotify is that they have already started taking over the podcast market. And by in the last couple of months, obviously, they've got Michelle Obama.

Michelle Obama's podcast, which is just one particular, very interesting demographic. And then they've got Joe Rogan. And to me, you couldn't get two more different people than Joe Rogan and Michelle Obama. You've got sort of, you know, alpha male, huge audience of men.

And then you've got Michelle Obama, huge audience of women. Obviously, there's crossover. But they are aggressively going after podcast listeners. And then what we've seen with, and their algorithms are incredible, absolutely incredible.

And then what we've seen with the podcast listeners is that people who listen to podcasts will often, more and more of them, listen to audio books. Because what happens is you're listening to a podcast and you're like, do you know what? I think that person's really interesting. I really want to read their books.

So, for example, successful self-publishing, you can get as an audio book read by me. Obviously, you have to pay a couple of dollars for that, or pounds, sorry, depending on the way you are. But it's, you know, so that's why people go from a podcast to an audio book. My fiction's available in audio.

So, just this, I think, Spotify, they're a company. They make money, right? So, if you look at people's listening habits, they will, they like their apps, you know, they like their particular things. And what they've got, I think their discoverability algorithm is incredible.

I also think that audio is going to subscription model anyway. And if you look at something like Scribd or Scribd in the UK, they have unlimited audio for a subscription. Storytell have a certain thing. Obviously, audible is slightly different, but subscription models are here to stay for sure.

And that's why the multiple streams of income importance. So, I hope that Spotify will pay audio book creators more, because obviously they don't pay podcast creators like ourselves at the moment. My podcasts are on Spotify and it's kind of a discoverability thing at the moment. But one would hope that when they move into audio books, they'll pay in the same way they pay musicians or, hopefully, better.

Yeah, good luck with that. Yeah. Well, exactly. You want to be in all of these markets or the ones that suit you.

I think I agree. The audio market is growing and growing, audible, commissioning, original dramas and comedies and radio for do not have the dominance, even in the UK that they used to have. And I think people tend to sort of forget that there are 500 million English speakers worldwide, first language English speakers worldwide. They're your market because the internet doesn't really care where you live unless you live in China or North Korea.

But other than that, you're sort of, you can find people. And it's an end in itself, if you like audio, particularly, I love audio. And in a way, I wish I'd been having a career 40 years earlier when Hancock's half hour was, you know, whatever, in the 1950s and 60s, where radio comedies were listened to by 25 million people. And that was exciting to me because I just love audio.

And that's why... I think that's what we're almost coming back into another golden age of audio. Like we really are because especially people are sick of screens. They are especially post-pandemic, you know, or during the pandemic.

People are, they're just on screens so much and they want time without screens. You know, my husband listens to these 40 plus hour fantasy novels. That's how he reads now. He reads through audio because his eyes are tired, you know, and just doesn't want to look at a screen anymore.

And people are getting their story and their entertainment. He's always chuckling along to some comedy podcast when he's cooking. But I think you're right about the attitude. And it's possible that it's because I left the UK in 2000 to go backpacking and then I didn't come back until 2011.

And I do often feel that if I had stayed in the UK, I may not have the career I have now because we have a very different attitude towards this kind of independent creativity. And I was living in Australia, which is a very different mentality, but also I was highly influenced by the bloggers, the American bloggers and podcasters early taught. So the influence by the Americans is realizing that the biggest paying online market English speaking is America. And then you think, okay, I can reach them.

Plus we have an advantage because Americans love listening to British people. So you actually get an advantage by having a different accent when you create your book. So I would say to people listening, you know, for example, if you have a book or if you've written something, you know, you might consider recording that yourself or if you're doing comedy. And you can't seem to use your voice.

So audio is a really good way in, I think. I think also because it's because audio is cheaper to do, you can achieve more in terms of volume, by which I mean, I think sometimes if you pull your heart and soul into one thing, you want to monetize that one thing. And the first thing you do is not going to be terribly profitable because nobody knows who you are. And actually what you're trying to do is create a canon of work, a body of work as part of a career.

And so actually you need to be thinking, you know, I need to write five books, ten books, fifteen books, audio plays, audio things, so that if they like this, then they'll buy that and then they'll buy that. And so I think audio particularly and the written word, whereas you can spend ten years making a two-hour movie, and that will pretty much take up your whole time. And in two hours it's done. It's like, well, where's the next one?

Well, I'm afraid it's going to be another ten years. Alright, I might be dead by then. So I think it is a good, in fact particularly you like those things. You don't want to see audio of the written word as a poor relation of the big screen or the small screen.

I should point out this point as well. The book I'm currently reading is one of your latest books. I think audio for authors and there's a whole range of ways in which you can do audio in your latest book. Is that correct?

Yes, thank you for mentioning it. Yes, indeed. Well, I think because I've been in audio so long and then there was a real tipping point in 2019 where the money started to come into podcasting. And you know, having podcasted for so long, it was like, oh my goodness, podcasting is about to go nuts.

And we've actually just seen, as we recall this in the last few weeks, the New York Times has bought a podcast network, a load of publishers have started a podcast network. So, you know, we're really seeing things take off in this sphere. So, yeah, audio for authors has a lot if people want to do it themselves. So, I mean, I've got here in my office, I've got like a frame with a blanket over where I record my audio.

A lot of audio book creators now have their own home studio and it's not even that expensive anymore. So, we're just so lucky to live in a time where we can create, we can produce, we can publish, we can get paid through the internet. One thing I'd just like to pick up on that you mentioned, and again, I was quite shocked when I was listening to a recent podcast that you did where you were interviewing somebody who has made a lot of progress on the AI. Listening to that podcast changed my view because I've always thought of AI as the enemy, Satan.

And I think a lot of people feel that way, a lot of people fear what it's going to bring. I can't remember the name of the guy you interviewed, but he kind of opened my eyes and that podcast has my eyes to the possibilities for AI. How do you see that developing in our creative worlds? Yeah, it's something I am totally fascinated with.

And my opinion is that you can't stop this. This is like the internet again. What you thought of the internet in sort of 1995 is where we are with artificial intelligence. And in fact, again, in the last couple of weeks, we've seen the release of GPT-3.

If people are interested, that is the most, I would say that's quite shocking to many people. What GPT-3 can do, which is basically right. So, this is very interesting. I think that we have to reinvent copyright law to deal with this.

I believe that what we want to do is license our work for the creation of more creative work. And I believe that licensing needs to be part of that so we can be paid as part of this new world. But also we need to embrace the tools. So, as I mentioned, I use Swivina as a tool.

I use Amazon KDP to publish. I use PayPal. We use Patreon. We're using Spotify, whatever.

So, I believe in embracing AI as a creative tool to help me do the things that I might not want to do so much of. So, for example, marketing, you mentioned before, doing paid ads on marketing would be great if an AI could do that for me. It would be great if the AI could figure out where I could find more readers. Maybe I can use an AI tool to help me do my research.

And this type of thing, thinking about it in a positive way is really important. AI mentioned AI voices. In fact, after we finished, I'm actually recording some audio for my voice double. So, I have a voice double using a system called Descript.com.

And what that means is that I can type text and then it will read it in my voice. And I believe that I'll be licensing my voice in the next couple of years. So, if you want to include my voice in your audio drama, you should be able to license it. And that will be another micro payment stream of income for me.

Oh, man. That is the sound there you can hear. The mind is exploding of people listening to this. This is huge stuff, isn't it?

But you want to be savvy to this stuff because it is coming. It is all coming. It is exciting. Exactly.

And I would say it's not coming. It is here. We already have the first AI-generated audio books. And this is the...

If you are not embracing it, then you're going to have a tough time. In the same way, if you don't embrace the way that we use the internet, you're going to have a tough time. And what is so interesting with the pandemic is that people who have listed a lot of online... My business was completely fine because I already ran my business on the internet.

It was already digital. But people have shifted in the last six months and suddenly pivoted into the digital space. And I know people... Obviously, there's been a lot of awful things and there are still a lot of awful things.

But I also know people who run a physical business who have pivoted online and are doing so much better because they realize they can teach people yoga in Finland or America. They're doing all these different things. So I want people to be excited about the possibilities. But obviously, there are lots of issues.

But the biggest issue is if creative people do not engage with AI and technology, they will do it anyway. And we will have missed out on being part of the conversation. That's why I really think creatives and people of all different creative persuasions need to engage with technology because otherwise suddenly something's released like GPT-3. And what's happening, if we don't recognize that that's possible, that's when it will harm us.

Whereas if we go, okay, I acknowledge this is happening. How can I surf this change? How can I use this and not get drowned by it? And I'm looking at it going, all right, I cannot beat the machine.

I cannot beat it. The machine will soon be writing books much faster than I can ever write. And how am I going to stand out? And what I believe it comes down to, as we mentioned, is the Thousand True Fans model by Kevin Kelly, which I talked about in that episode, 500, which is double down on being human, double down on being you.

And you will attract people because you are human, because you are you. And you don't need to be number one in the world to make money. You're living in the long table. You make your money where you are and who you are.

And that's pretty empowering, I think. Can you just say a bit more about that 500 True Fans? I've read that fairly recently. Yeah, but it depends on how much you're charging your fans.

But why don't you say a bit about that? Because I think that's quite an encouraging thought, really. Yeah, so it was sort of, I think it was 2006. Kevin Kelly, who started Wide Magazine, wrote an article called A Thousand True Fans.

And it's, you know, back then, also back then was the concept of the long tail, which is the mass market is over. More and more. People are not reading the same thing. They're not watching the same thing.

They're not listening to the same thing. We all have our little micro niches where we live. And, you know, we find this weird podcast on, you know, knitting with a particular type of wool that we just love that niche, you know, that type of thing. So what the Family True Fans basically says, the mass market is over.

You're not going to have that hit TV show like Friends, because essentially, there wasn't anything else on at the time. There were only three channels. But now there are unlimited number of channels for your time. There are unlimited number of shows on Netflix.

And we're not all watching the same thing. You know, I watched them, Warrior None the other night. I love Warrior None. And I'm like, wow, they really designed the show just for me.

And that's what they can do. And if you log on to Netflix, you get shown different shows than I do. And so when this Thousand True Fans is okay, who likes a 45-year-old English woman who enjoys con air and Warrior None? If you're a fan of those things, you might like my fiction.

And if you like one of my books, maybe you like two of them. And thus I can make 20 bucks, 30 bucks, 50 bucks from that reader over my lifetime. And if I can make a number of people who like what I do, then I can make a living without relying on having this number one hit. And I feel like people who are denying this reality, they're the ones who are making less and less money every year because that's just not what we're living in anymore.

I guess people are, in sitcom terms, they want to do a sitcom like Porridge or Only Fools and Horses because that's what they were brought up with. And then they want to write books that they can go into a bookshop and buy physically because that's what they were brought up with. And actually, TV is streaming and there's a whole world out there of stuff. And also the amount of ebooks being read now, it's not even newsworthy, is it?

I mean, in terms of just like, you know, people, I think probably lots of listens to our show probably are above aborigly attached to the printed word. But that ship sails a decade ago, didn't it? Something like that. What percentage of your books do you think are physical books compared to ebooks?

Yeah, I don't know why you say that at all because, I mean, for my nonfiction, it's 60% print probably. I mean, it's what has changed is that the vast majority of print books are sold online. So people buy print on Amazon, they buy print on Hive, they buy print from, you know, you can order my books from your local bookstore. And the reality, and you know, my books are available in large print, they're available in the hardback there in e-book.

So there is, I think, yeah, I'm not sure where you got that from. Well, no, it's more that we are kind of, we have the things that we aspire to and they're basically paradigms that took 20 years to become successful in the 90s rather than actually to go, well, these are all kind of changing and we need to be open to the fact that people are consuming different things in different ways. I mean, the idea that even 40% of your stuff is bought as an e-book, I mean, that is a huge percentage to where people thought it would be, you know, 10 years ago. People thought, oh, no, the e-book, that will never catch up.

I think it's the other way, actually, because I think, you know, when I started in 1983 and I was writing for radio and pretty much through the 80s and 90s, it was all kind of, well, how long, how long has radio got? And then video came along, and video came along, people said, oh, how long have the movies got? It's the end of radio, it's the end of the movies, it's the end of e-books came along, it's the end of the paper back. I think, I think like, I was saying about the way that people sick of screens, you know, people are also, you know, they like to hold a book, you know, they like to have that thing in their hand.

And I think those things are the kind of things that we can hold on to and embrace AI at the same time. I think my next book should be available only on audio cassette. How about that? Well, they say that cassettes are coming back like fine, I can't see it myself.

I think what is different is the way we produce these things. So my print books are print on demand. So basically, if you order one at your local bookstore, that they will put an order in through the catalogue, one copy will be printed and sent out. And the same if you order them on Amazon or whatever.

So that's changed. That's brilliant as well. It's much greener, much more sustainable. Yeah, and you don't have 5,000 copies in a warehouse somewhere that need to then be shipped and shipped.

I've got a friend who's republished some books that are out of copyright that are related to academic stuff in the 19th century. And yeah, every single book is printed in the territory where somebody buys it from anywhere in the world. Exactly, and that is the type of thing where you can have all of these products, you can print on demand everything now. You know, people are selling print on demand masks now, you know, with branding on from your podcast, if you like, you know, some swag.

But I think, you know, the main message of this show and my message is certainly all about empowering creatives to say, okay, I'm taking control of my career. What one thing can I do today to learn about something new, to look at a person that I want to do something like them, to go find out how they do what they do, learn that thing, and then put something into action. And just to take those little sets day after day and sort of circling back to where we started, if you take those little steps day after day doing what you love and finding out new ways to reach people. Then you know, you look back a decade later and you're like, whoa, okay, this has worked.

Yeah, yeah, I think people as an aphorism, which is people overestimate what they can do in a year and they underestimate what they can do in five years. I think it's always a question of just make a start. And then actually, after a while, you'll realize you actually moved a lot further than you thought, even though at the time it felt like a glacial pace that you were moving. So, I did just end up then, we can say, it feels like a good time to ask you this because that episode 500 you were very much kind of reflecting on the previous years.

What is that kind of one thing that you would say about everything else? You've told us your desert island things. Now, what's the one thing that we should take away from what you've learned in those 12 years? I think it's that anything is possible and that if you have, even if you have these big goals, so of course, I would love to have a movie like Conair made of my books or Mr.

and Mrs. Smith is one of my favorite movies. And my thrillers are in that kind of genre really, that kind of big thriller action adventure genre. I would love that.

That is still a goal of mine. I want to make seven figures in a year. I want to do, I have these big goals, but I'm not going to spend my time aiming just at that goal. It's like, what are the little things I can do along the way?

And so I feel like you can do anything and you can learn how to do it in that way. And as you said, it's just step by step by step. And I would really encourage people, especially if you're sitting on years of work, if you're sitting on 30 years of writing, I don't know what rights do you own of those things. I know that you own nothing, but it may be that you have work in you or you could create work.

You might be sitting on money right now. I know so many traditionally published authors who have not licensed, say, in America. If you've licensed work in the UK, do you have the rights to publish it in the US? It may be that you are already sitting on work that you could license or publish yourself or whatever.

So I would say, you know, really, especially audio rights that just weren't part of the original thing. Yes, or even did. Right. So the reason J.K.

Rowling has Pottermore. She published, she independently publishes all her ebooks because she didn't sign away the ebook rights of Harry Potter. And she did it. She decided not to.

So she has Pottermore because she sells all the ebooks of Harry Potter through her own company. So Bismarck, like J.K. Rowling. Yeah.

She could use the extra income stream there, I think. Yeah, absolutely. But that's the point. She empowered herself with the knowledge.

When the publishers said, and of course they did, Hey, would you sign this contract addendum giving us the rights? So you just said there about the audio rights that people might be sitting on. What are the other rights you're just sitting on of your written material? Because of course all comedy writers have a lot of written material, right?

So what can you do with that stuff? So yeah, the overall message is just to be an empowered creative. And if you're not feeling very empowered, then empower yourself by learning some of this stuff. And yeah, just get out there and do it.

Yeah. And what obviously would be to seek out your podcast and you've got 500 episodes to catch up on folks. So go and do that. What's the name of the podcast is?

Okay, so I have the creative pen podcast, Penn with a double N. And as I said, successful self publishing free ebook. If you want to go and if you want to learn about self publishing, I also have the books and travel podcast. If you enjoy books and travel.

Well, that's brilliant. And that's very, very empowering. I'm going to go away. I'm very inspired now.

I'm feeling 42% more empowered than I was an hour ago. And he was already pretty empowered. I can tell you that. And I am still, I have a great advantage in AI.

You did still manage to lose me, unfortunately, for about 10 minutes in the middle of that podcast. No, I don't know what it's all David. We will patch you back in and nobody will know. And nobody will know.

Well, as I said that, you said you did it this one. So you're going to do it as well as take out the bit that I've just said just now. Okay, well, we might just have to kick that in for irony purposes. Thanks very much.

It's been a great pleasure having you on the show and all the best for the next 500 episodes. Thanks for having me guys. Thank you so much.